Identity Crisis: Is It European Or Arabic?

August 21, 1985|By Jonathan Broder, Chicago Tribune.

CASABLANCA, MOROCCO — There`s a bar called the Casablanca at the Hyatt Regency Hotel here, with old movie posters of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman cheek to cheek above the electric piano with a built-in drum that pulses out ``As Time Goes By.``

There`s a Rick`s Bar in the seedy downtown port area that tries hard to recreate an atmosphere of misty intrigue, but somehow misses the mark with a misspelled menu that boasts ``Fine Middle Eastern Food with a European Ambulance.``

But there is little here that resembles the movie-lot city of the film, except for the fog that rolls in off the Atlantic and the growing desire of many unemployed Casablancans to leave.

``You played it for her, now play it for me. Play it!`` Rick`s line haunts the mind like an unforgettable refrain. But there is one line heard often here that never appeared in the movie: ``No problem.`` Casablancans constantly assure visitors and themselves. ``No problem,`` they say, though their insouciance couldn`t be more misplaced.

With a population of 3 million, Casablanca has many problems. Some, such as overcrowding, traffic snarls and pollution, are the usual price of big-city life.

Others, however, reflect a deeper malaise that afflicts Morocco and the entire Arab world--the diminishing relevance of monarchial rule, the daily clash of Western ideas and styles with traditional Middle Eastern conservatism and the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism.

Last year, when the government of King Hassan II canceled food subsidies and thousands rioted in protest, angry Moroccans burned effigies of the king for the first time since he assumed the throne in 1961.

In 1971, army officers hatched a plot against Hassan. It failed, but it worried him enough to disband the general staff, eliminate the defense minister`s post and eradicate the military`s entire lateral system of communication.

The moves have left Hassan the unchallenged commander-in-chief of Morocco`s armed forces but have reduced the officer corps to little more than a group of high-ranking aides-de-camp whose consultations with the king conist of kneeling and kissing his ring, Western military experts say. One can almost hear Morocco`s military professionals sighing nostalgically, ``We`ll always have Casablanca.``

``Dieu, Patrie, Roi``--God, country and king--reads the emblem at an air force base outside the city. ``If you reverse the order, the real priorities here become a lot clearer,`` noted one pilot.

French. French signs, French movies, French food, French clothes, French radio programs, French music, French schools, French conversation. The influence of Morocco`s former colonial masters is ubiquitous.

Visually, Casablanca has far more in common with Nice or Marseille than with any other North African Arab city. The middle and upper classes, conversant in Arabic, prefer to speak French the way prerevolutionary Russians did, considering their mother tongue fit only for horses.

Morocco`s preference for things French has made it something of an anomaly in the Arab world, where the stress, at least outwardly, always has been on pan-Arabism and the regional uniformity of language and religion.

Still, Casablanca recently hosted an emergency meeting of the Arab League. Listening to Hassan`s welcoming speech to conference delegates on television, one longtime observer noted it was probably the first time the king had spoken Arabic in years. He then noticed that several delegates from the Persian Gulf were wearing translators` earphones over their headdresses.

The story of one Casablancan`s Arabic education provides a classic illustration of Morocco`s position on the fringes of the Arab world and its alternating desires to join their brethren and to steer clear of their problems.

Nadia Bradley, educated exclusively in French schools in Casablanca, went to Beirut as a journalist during the 1975-76 civil war. Later she was caught in Israel, convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for involvement in the Palestine Liberation Organization. It was in an Israeli jail that she learned to speak Arabic for the first time. Today, residing again in Casablanca, she wears slinky French dresses, speaks in French and English and prefers to shun Palestinian politics.

Perhaps it is Morocco`s location beneath the soft underbelly of Europe, where radio stations from Spain and France are heard more clearly than those from the rest of North Africa, that accounts for the country`s ambivalent attitude toward the Arab world and its conviction that it can straddle both continents. Nowhere is this attitude more clearly seen than on Casablanca`s beaches.

There, amid the surf and beachside stands selling doughnuts, ice cream and fruit, it is not uncommon to see a mysteriously veiled woman in a long Arabic gown enter a beach cabin to emerge in a minuscule bikini without the slightest awareness of incongruity.